Antonio Banderas received a Platino Award last year in a ceremony in Marbella, Spain. The actor took the chance to call for more Latino unity across Spanish-speaking countries as well as to recognize that the United States is where he has ironically seen the Latino best come together.

So far, the lack of qualified, serious, trustworthy candidates running for president in 2016 is pretty notable. And yes, the election is still a year away. I will nonetheless announce my top two candidates thus far. I think everyone can agree that these two have set themselves apart from the rest of the field.

I think we’re missing out on a very important conversation as families and neighbors. Future generations will ask us about the civil rights movement of our day, and what will we tell them? Will we remember it? Will we learn from it?

In the first debate between Romney and Obama, Romney walked out with a historic win. Obama was underprepared and unfocused. But I want to explore another factor that hurt him deeply: he forgot about Romney’s Etch-A-Sketch.

Ever since Mitt Romney declared his intentions to become the Republican nominee for president in 2008, one of the chief criticisms directed at him has been that he isn’t ideologically pure enough, that he isn’t a “true” conservative, or that he’s changed positions on key issues too many times. In other words, he’s weak on Republican principles. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

Whenever a court or a judge strikes down a popular piece of legislation, it’s pretty common to hear political pundits (or the people who parrot their talking points) complain about “activist judges”, a.k.a. “elites who overturn the will of the people”. However, these same people will often turn around the next week and praise similar activities by the judicial branch because they have “upheld the Constitution”. Wise observers of this phenomenon quip that the best definition of “activist judge” is “a judge that deems my legislation of choice to be unconstitutional.”